No Man’s Land?

Published on 02.06.2015

Photographs can often bring out our emotions, making us think, reflect on life, transport us to places we might never see, make our imagination fly. But, deep down, a photograph can also exude subtleness. A subtlety that keeps our eyes glued to the picture letting us to feel our body’s reaction, without ever really being able to understand why the image has wrapped us up and won us over.

The images themselves can be fed by a symbolism provided by our own personal history, leading us to rediscover and return to the experiences that were tucked away in the back of our memories, but always in a private and non-transferrable way.

It would be wonderful if anyone looking at this picture felt the same way as I do, but this is hardly ever the case. But when it happens, when you look at an image and immediately feel this special, indefinable something, which goes beyond what we see, then the magic becomes real.

This is what I’m looking for. The way to convert a picture into pure feeling, which makes anyone looking at the image to feel it as their own, filling them with a deep emotion.

At the gates of Jerusalem, the ancient city, in the place where two worlds that are so alike, yet so different, flirt endlessly with the end, whilst feeding a historical and visceral hated, a simple sign seems to divide the absurdness even more. On one side is the cradle of the beliefs shared by many people in the world and, on the other, the capital it might never become of those who miss their land, their own place on Earth.

The faith of some, the struggle and desire of others, at the feet of metres and metres of cement, armed by those who managed to be who they wanted and now fight to stay that way. As though they were marking an absurdness, terribly diluted in the land that has drunk more blood. An image that, despite the intensity of the names, captures the essence of the Mediterranean, the pureness of its blue haze, the vital luminosity which, not so far away, is enjoyed by others without having to carry the weight of history on their shoulders with the same sun appearing to be another actor that is determined to tell us we’re really not so different.